Ok - I have tracked this down to a problem with freetype2.
Ghostscript provides its own but pkgsrc places references to system
freetype2 libs in CFLAGS and CPPFLAGS (I'm using XDarwin) as
"-I/opt/X11/include/freetype2". This causes a build failure when just
building ghostscript without pkgsrc. Building without this produces a
working gs.
I can't figure out how that "-I/opt/X11/include/freetype2" is getting
in to the CFLAGS in pkgsrc. I tried commenting out the reference to
freetype2's buildlink3.mk. No luck there.
How can I get pkgsrc to not put in this include path at configure
time? If I can get past that, I should be able to test my theory.
Louis

Normally, adding PREFER.freetype2=pkgsrc to your mk.conf would trigger
the use of pkgsrc's freetype2 package. But I suspect freetype2 gets
picked by something else. Do you define X11BASE? Or, maybe, a
configure script detects it.
On Mac OS X, I don't use X11 at all (X11BASE=/dev/null X11_TYPE=none
PKG_DEFAULT_OPTIONS=-x11) as most package provide support for Quartz
graphics. :)
Kind regards,
Adam

Ok. So if I set "PKG_OPTIONS.ghostscript += -x11" and configure like
this...
# X11BASE=/dev/null X11_TYPE=none bmake configure
===> Creating toolchain wrappers for ghostscript-agpl-9.07nb4
ERROR: freetype2>=2.4.5 freetype2>=2.1.3 freetype2>=2.1.3 is not
installed; can't buildlink files.
*** Error code 1
Stop.
... It's wanting to use pkgsrc's freetype2 and I've commented the
`.include "../../graphics/freetype2/buildlink3.mk"' in Makefile.
But upstream wants (and I want) us to use the freetype that's rolled in
to ghostscript's distribution. How do we make that happen?
Louis

Ok - Setting PREFER.freetype2=pkgsrc fixes this by forcing the use of
pkgsrc's freetype. Perhaps that should be the default on OS X?